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“Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results…The scale of Telegraph Avenue is no less ambitious…Much of the wit…inheres in Chabon’s astonishing prose. I don’t just mean the showy bits…I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere.”
— New York Times Book Review (cover review)
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“Telegraph Avenue is so exuberant, it’s as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words…His sentences spring, bounce, set off sparklers, even when dwelling in mundane details…Fantastic.”
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
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“An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story…[Chabon’s] people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the author’s buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience—something increasingly rare in our ADD age.”
— New York Times
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“An exhilarating, bighearted novel.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine
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“Astounding…Steamrolls the barrier that has kept the Great American Novel at odds with the country it’s supposed to reflect…[A] huge-hearted, funny, improbably hip book.”
— Boston Globe
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“Fresh, unpretentious, delectably written…For all his explorations into the contentious dynamics of family, race, and community, Mr. Chabon’s first desire is simply to enchant with words. Eight novels in, he still uses language like someone amazed by a newly discovered superpower.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“Witty and compassionate and full of more linguistic derring-do than any other writer in American could carry off.”
— Washington Post
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“A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage…Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women.”
— Esquire
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“Chabon’s hugely likable characters all face crises of existential magnitude, rendered in an Electra Glide flow of Zen sentences and zinging metaphors that make us wish the needle would never arrive at the final groove.”
— Elle
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“A beautiful, prismatic maximalism of description and tone, a sly meditation on appropriation as the real engine of integration, and an excellent rationale for twelve-page sentences.”
— GQ
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“A magnificently crafted, exuberantly alive, emotionally lustrous, and socially intricate saga…Bubbling with lovingly curated knowledge about everything from jazz to pregnancy…Chabon’s rhapsodically detailed, buoyantly plotted, warmly intimate cross-cultural tale of metamorphoses is electric with suspense, humor, and bebop dialogue…An embracing, radiant masterpiece.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“‘Virtuosity’ is the word most commonly associated with Chabon, and if Telegraph Avenue, the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is at first glance less conceptual than its predecessors, the sentences are no less remarkable.”
— Publishers Weekly
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“If any novelist can pack the entire American zeitgeist into 500 pages, it’s Chabon…Ambitious, densely written, sometimes very funny, and fabulously over the top, here’s a rare book that really could be the great American novel.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“An end-of-an era epic…A Joyce-an remix with a hipper rhythm track.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)